Thomas Pynchon: Inherent Vice (2009)

“Was it possible, that at every gathering – concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever – those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?” Pynchon’s new novel is a psychedelic noir, an acid trip version of The Big Sleep whose narrative drives the highways of Los Angeles in a state of stoned paranoia. Around 1970 in Gordita Beach (an imaginary beach community clearly modeled on Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon once lived), Larry “Doc” Sportello, a pothead/hippie private investigator, gets dragged into a kidnapping and murder mystery by his ex-girlfriend. Doc is asked to investigate the disappearance of a real estate mogul who, after taking some acid, decided to make amends for charging rent in the past by creating a free housing community. While searching for his man, Doc encounters Aryan biker gangs that work as bodyguards, black nationalists fleeing from FBI Counterintelpro forces, surf rock bands holed up in Topanga Canyon with groupies, cops with “post-Mansonical nerves” on the lookout for new murderous cults, and an endless series of drugged-out friends and family. After the ambitious historical scope and scale of his last two novels, Pynchon is clearly lowering his aim with Inherent Vice, which returns to the Southern California territory of Vineland, though with far more success. Approached with appropriately reduced expectations, the excessively convoluted plot of Inherent Vice offers a humorous and entertaining portrait of a counter culture being actively repressed. But not even Pynchon can do much to make the drug subculture into a fecund literary subject, and the book’s relentless pothead humor and drug-induced paranoia will immediately bring to mind The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and even The Big Lebowski. More troubling is how the clarity of historical hindsight leads Pynchon to make a bit too explicit and pat his account of the eclipse of the “Psychedelic Sixties.” The cryptic brilliance of The Crying of Lot 49, from the private mail system WASTE to the famous description of Southern California’s sprawl as a “printed circuit” whose meaning is opaque, no doubt was assisted by Pynchon’s proximity to the historical movements being described. In Inherent Vice, however, the 1960s are the clearly delimited and defined “Sixties,” whose corruption by “The System” is a foregone conclusion. At one point, Doc dreams “about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness. . .” Doc predicts the end of the great private investigators, since the outsider anti-heroes of noir, such as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, have been replaced by popular cop television shows that portray the police positively and make the public “so cop-happy they’re beggin to be run in.” Doc reflects on his casual sex partner: “He wished he could believe her more, but the business was unforgiving, and life in psychedelic-sixties L.A. offered more cautionary arguments than you could wave a joint at against too much trust and the seventies were looking no more promising.” Even the cops make such claims, as Doc’s antagonist, the policeman “Bigfoot” Bjornsen says, “Odd, yes, here in the capital of eternal youth, endless summer and all, that fear should be running the town again as in days of old, like the Hollywood blacklist you don’t remember and the Watts rioting you do – it spreads, like blood in a swimming pool, till it occupies all the volume of the day.”